DIY & Crafts

Best DIY Window Cleaner Recipes — How To Make Windows Clean & Streak-Free

by craftmin | January 26, 2018

Toxins threaten our environment, and luckily, we have personal care and home care products to deal with them. It is important to rid our place of toxins if we are to pursue good health. Do you know where toxins are also present? Well, a lot of store-bought cleaning products like glass cleaners also have it. Anyway, it isn’t just toxins that really bother us; sometimes, it’s the chalky streaks and filmy residues left once our glass window dries after cleaning it. If you’re on a tight budget, the use of a DIY window cleaner is the way to go.

Let’s try to focus more on our windows, glass windows so to say. Maybe you find it very convenient to just use store-bought window cleaners but—are you really that desperate to break the bank? Would you not consider the heavy chemicals they bring?

Why not go for a DIY window cleaner? For a fair price, it leaves a nice streak-free sheen and is also versatile, so you can use it on glass surfaces throughout your home, from glass shower doors, mirrors to the fronts of your picture frames. It doesn’t even take a lot of time to prepare. It’s simple! Take the two DIY window cleaner recipes below for example. But before that, we need to consider the benefits that a DIY window cleaner offers.

Benefits of a DIY Window Cleaner

1. Eco-Friendly

The environment is already filled with toxins, and adding some more toxins is probably a bad idea. So don’t be surprised that the more toxins there is, the more rampant cancer, autism and auto-immune diseases are. That’s why any way to reduce toxins, even in the slightest, is a health bonus and is already a huge help for the environment.

2. Toxin-Free

Do you know what many popular store-bought cleaning products have?

Liquitint Sky Blue Dye

Propylene Glycol

Fragrance Palette (The Chemical Components Of These Artificial Fragrances Are Unhealthy)

2 Hexoxyethanol

Sodium C14-17 Sec-Alkyl Sulfonat

Ammonium Hydroxide

Viden Egm

Mirapol Surf S-210

Don’t be naïve! Cleanliness isn’t just about seeing things in order, shiny, and smelling good, but it’s also about minding your health—and a DIY window cleaner will help you with that.

3. Tightens the Purse Strings

Finally, there’s the question “how much can you save by using a DIY window cleaner instead of store-bought ones?” A lot!

Let’s take the second recipe for example and try to do some calculations here.

Water is free. However, in some areas, it isn’t. So let’s say, it’ll cost you $0.002 per gallon.

Vinegar might be around the price of $0.59 for 32 oz. Let’s say we’ll have the price doubled and put it in $0.04.

A local Midwest store has cornstarch for $1.39 at the moment. Let’s say that it’ll cost you $0.04 for a tablespoon.

And according to the current Rite Aid pricing, Isopropyl Alcohol costs $0.25 for ¼ Cup.

So—you’d probably spend $0.33 in total to make two ½ cups of DIY window cleaner.

If you check out Amazon for the popular brand on the market, Windex costs $2.63. If you do some math and determine the cost per ounce, you’d probably save about 87% for two 2 ½ cups (20 oz).

Even if you don’t mind spending, you might want to still consider a homemade one for its other benefits. Think about it!

DIY Window Cleaner Recipes

Moving on, probably the use of plain vinegar is the most popular when it comes to cleaning glass and mirrors.

Because we barely mind our windows, we often forget to clean them. So if you have time, damp a piece of scratch paper, tissue paper or newspaper with plain vinegar and wipe the mirror with it. This is a neat trick to clean your glass windows, but the problem is the stubborn streaks that it leaves behind. If absolutely necessary, vinegar will do fine. However, if you don’t want streaks on your glass, the DIY window cleaner recipes below can help.

Recipe 1

Are you tired of trying various window cleaners from store-bought to homemade concoctions, and even using newspaper rather than paper towels, but in the end, you realized that they weren’t really helping? Brace yourself because that’ll all change with this winning recipe!

Image Courtesy of She Wears Many Hats

Are you planning on ordering some new glasses to update a room in your place? This simple recipe is a neat trick proven by many professional commercial window cleaners. If the simple combination of water and vinegar doesn’t work, add a few amount of dish soap to the vinegar solution, and voila! —you’ve got yourself a DIY window cleaner. Surprised at how simple it is?

The solution below will crack you up and have you wear shades (it’s gonna be so bright inside!). It’s super simple. You can even use a hose and a soft bristle brush with it. Forget about ladders and the piles of used paper towels! This will be all about clarity.

Cleaning Tools

Directions

Dip the soft bristle scrub brush with some sort of an extension pole handle on in a bucket of the mixture. Then, scrub the window with it.

Before the window dries, using a water hose with a sprayer add-on that fits it, rinse or spray the window off with clean water thoroughly.

Tips

You can use a spray bottle to prepare and use the solution. However, if you’re working on many windows, especially those that are hard to reach, it would be much better to use the scrub brush, water hose, and bucket.

If you’re not comfortable climbing a ladder to clean faraway windows and just to be on the safe side, use an all-around extension pole that has a threaded end so that you can attach different rollers, brushes, etcetera. (Just like this one)

Outside windows can also benefit from this DIY window cleaner recipe. You just have to carefully rinse the cleaning solution with water. If you’re going to use it indoors, make sure to completely rinse with water. Why not have a spray bottle for the clean water and another spray bottle for the solution?

For the last time, don’t forget to rinse thoroughly before the homemade cleaner dries on the window.

Recipe 2

A lot of sites recommend this second DIY window cleaner recipe. Judging from the many positive feedbacks it garnered, it is the real deal.

Image Courtesy of Our Homemade Happiness

Rubbing alcohol aka Isopropyl alcohol is one of the key ingredients of this window cleaner. Some people are not in favor of it, but if it isn’t a problem for you, it might just be the godsend recipe you’re looking for. There are DIY window cleaner recipes that do not use isopropyl alcohol but will require you to spend more money.

By the way, this recipe doesn’t come with rubbing alcohol only; it also contains cornstarch. Surprised? In fact, it is what makes this DIY window cleaner very effective.

How Does the Cornstarch contribute to the cleaning power of this homemade cleaner?

To fill in the blanks and bust this myth, let’s take this to a microscopic level. You might think that glass is perfectly smooth, but it’s actually not. Once it comes in contact with water, the molecules of water get stuck in the pits on the surface of the glass. Because of hydrogen bonding wherein, two molecules having hydrogen atoms that cling together, water also follows the same principle and sticks to itself. Thus, water caught by more water and water caught in the glass cause streaks to appear. Cornstarch prevents streaks by disrupting the hydrogen bonding. The same science applies to dish soap and oil.

Rumor has it that marble can be damaged by vinegar, so be wary of using vinegar on/around marble surfaces.

DIY Window Cleaner Uses

These DIY window cleaner recipes are great for:

Plastic

Windows

Ceramic

Mirrors

Aluminum

Glass Appliances

Chrome

Stainless Steel

Streak-free windows are not some myth that you will never achieve. Here’s a free video clip that you should watch to learn about a cleaning solution that can give you streak-free windows with help from an experienced window cleaner.

So what do you think of the DIY window cleaner recipes? Hope these recipes motivate you to improve your family’s health, save for the rainy days, and reduce toxins. Clean your windows, keep the shades on, and have a bright future!